Editorial

Investing for the future

Although I realise that it is not the first time that such donations have been made, I am very pleased to see that BMW are giving away their “old”robots to schools (see page 487). Although surplus to requirements, these robots are still relatively new and with today’s reliability levels should be able to work well for many years to come.

Making this generous donation will have cost BMW little in terms of money and effort, but gains them good publicity and means that the students have real world robots to experiment with rather than sterile PC based simulations.

Here in the UK we have a shortage of engineers and I know that many other countries are in the same position. My first tentative footsteps towards a career in engineering were made building trucks and cranes with a Mecanno set. I cannot help feeling that engineers are essentially “hands- on”people at heart and that today’s children are missing out on this real life experience. Ok, I cut myself a few times when the screwdriver slipped off the head of the screw I was tightening, and I bent or broke a few of the components; but how else do you learn about torque and slip and stiffness?

The majority of work undertaken by qualified engineers is performed on computers and anything else would rightly be considered as amateurish. However I consider that it is important that budding engineers experience the pleasure,pain, disappointment and exhilaration of making things with their own hands and minds before retreating behind a mouse and keyboard. Not only does this give them a better chance of being grabbed by the romance of engineering in the first place, but it also helps equip them with a sense of practicality that is all important in a good professional engineer.

Well done BMW.

Repetitive research

I will shortly be packing my bags to attend the ISR 2002 in Stockholm and it will all be over by the time this issue is published. In the IFR Newsletter that I have just received (see page 493) both Mike Wilson (IFR Chairman) and Joe Engelberger (Helpmate Robotics Inc.) are calling for a step change in how we conduct robotics research. I quite agree with their concerns and with their shared calling for better communications between researchers and other researchers and (more importantly in my view), researchers and potential users.

There are two different types of research. The first investigates interesting phenomena without any clear idea of future potential applications. The early work on liquid crystals is one example of this approach. The second type of research starts with a known problem and sets about finding a solution. The electric light bulb was thus born.

I firmly believe that there is room for both types of research and that both are equally worthy. The trouble is that it is much easier to get funding for something with a clear objective! My own Ph.D. was titled “Machine vision for industrial inspection”. Hardly a best seller, and I imagine that it has by now gathered a thick layer of dust in the vaults of Nottingham University library. However, I have always considered myself fortunate that I started my research with little or no knowledge of the subject.

There is a lot of sense in the view that if you are planning to do research in a particular field, that you should first study the work that has already been published. Anything else runs the very high risk of “reinventing the wheel”. This is perfectly true, however it is also inevitable that your mind will become cluttered with other people’s ideas and once this has happened I believe it is then exponentially more difficult to come up with a truly original idea.

If what we need from robotics research is simply incremental improvements to the status quo, then better communications between the various parties concerned is clearly the way to go. If on the other hand we consider that we have backed ourselves into a blind alley then lateral thinking is called for.

With some trepidation as to the consequences, I would like to criticise the present basis of academic research. Promotion, personal remuneration and academic status are largely based on the number of research papers that a person publishes and on the number of times that their work is cited by other academics. This approach actively encourages researchers to tread familiar paths and so we should not at all be surprised when they end up in familiar places.

So what would I propose instead? I would recommend that a novice researcher be effectively locked in a sealed room and denied access to any previous research articles for a good period of time. How long depends on how they get on. Their supervisor should stop them if they start doing anything that has been done before, and tell them to start again. After this initial period, which might be anything from a few months to a year, the researcher should then be forced to search out other papers in the same general area, and use this additional knowledge to redirect and reinforce their own work.

Some will sink, some will swim, and some will fly.